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MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- If cicadas made horror movies, they'd probably study the actions of their counterparts plagued by a certain psychedelic fungus.

West Virginia University researchers have discovered that a cicada fungus called Massopora contains chemicals similar to those found in hallucinogenic mushrooms.

The fungus causes cicadas to lose their limbs and eccentric behavior sets in: Males try to mate with everything they encounter, although the fungus has consumed their genitals and butts.

Despite the horrid physical state of infected cicadas, they continue to roam around freely as if nothing's wrong, dousing other cicadas with a dose of their disease.

You've heard of "The Walking Dead." This is "The Flying Dead."

"They are only zombies in the sense that the fungus is in control of their bodies," said Matt Kasson, assistant professor of forest pathology and one of the study's authors.

Cicadas first encounter the fungus underground where they spend 13 to 17 years before emerging to the surface as adults, Kasson said. Within seven to 10 days above ground, the abdomen begins to slough off revealing the fungal infection at the end of the cicada, he continued.

It's quite the coming out party.

"Infected adults maintain or accelerate normal host activity during sporulation, enabling rapid and widespread dispersal prior to host death," Kasson said. "They also engage in hypersexual behaviors."

Joining Kasson on this research published in Fungal Ecology are his Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design colleagues Greg Boyce, Kasson's former Ph.D. student in the Division of Plant and Soil Sciences; and Daniel Panaccione, professor of plant and soil sciences.

The impetus of the study came in 2016 when billions of cicadas ascended upon the northeast United States. Two of Kasson's students loved cicadas. One, Matt Berger, convinced the professor to study the fungus. Another student, Angie Macias, coined a creative, heavy metal sounding name for the cicadas: "flying salt shakers of death."

Initially, the research team tried infecting the cicadas in a lab but that method did not work. But they managed to examine enough infected cicadas from the wild to make the new discovery.

For those of you wondering if you can get "high" from the psychedelic chemicals in a Massospora-infected cicada, Kasson's answer is "maybe, if you're motivated enough."

"Here is the thing," he said. "These psychoactive compounds were just two of less than 1,000 compounds found in these cicadas. Yes, they are notable but there are other compounds that might be harmful to humans. I wouldn't take that risk."

Kasson and his team are buzzing along on additional cicada research. They recently collected cicadas from this year's emergence in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. They plan to resequence the genome of the fungus and analyze the gene expression in both healthy and infected cicadas to better understand the genetic aspects of the discovery.

And beyond the discovery being downright creepy and fascinating, it may lead to someday benefiting the greater society instead of serving as nightmare fuel.

"We anticipate these discoveries will foster a renewed interest in early diverging fungi and their pharmacologically important secondary metabolites, which may serve as the next frontier for novel drug discovery.

"I love them (cicadas). They still scare me when they fall down my shirt or walk up my neck but I can appreciate something that spends almost two decades underground for six weeks of bliss, with or without the fungus."

ITHACA, N.Y. - Cornell University researchers have developed an algorithm designed to visualize models of the universe in order to solve some of physics' greatest mysteries.

The algorithm was developed by applying scientific principles used to create models for understanding cell biology and physics to the challenges of cosmology and big data.

"Science works because things behave much more simply than they have any right to," said professor of physics James Sethna. "Very complicated things end up doing rather simple collective behavior."

Sethna is the senior author of "Visualizing Probabilistic Models With Intensive Principal Component Analysis," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The algorithm, designed by first author Katherine Quinn, allows researchers to image a large set of probabilities to look for patterns or other information that might be useful, and provides them with better intuition for understanding complex models and data.

"A person can't just sit down and do it," Quinn said. "We need better algorithms that can extract what we're interested in, without being told what to look for. We can't just say, 'Look for interesting universes.' This algorithm is a way of untangling information in a way that can reveal the interesting structure of the data."

Further complicating the researchers' task was the fact that the data consists of ranges of probabilities, rather than raw images or numbers.

Their solution takes advantage of different properties of probability distributions to visualize a collection of things that could happen. In addition to cosmology, their model has applications to machine learning and statistical physics, which also work in terms of predictions.

To test the algorithm, the researchers used data from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, and studied it with co-author Michael Niemack, associate professor of physics. They applied the model data on the cosmic microwave background - radiation left over from the universe's early days.

The model produced a map depicting possible characteristics of different universes, of which our own universe is one point.

This new method of visualizing the qualities of our universe highlights the hierarchical structure of the dark energy and dark matter dominated model that fits the cosmic microwave background data so well. These visualizations present a promising approach for optimizing cosmological measurements in the future, Niemack said.

Next, researchers will try to expand this approach to allow for more parameters for each data point. Mapping such data could reveal new information about our universe, other possible universes or dark energy - which appears to be the dominant form of energy in our universe but about which physicists still know little.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Democrats and Republicans may stand on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but when it comes to President Donald Trump's tweets, they have more in common than meets the eye.

Both parties disapprove of Trump's tweets that insult people or contain false information, and they like language that supports the military or shares condolences, regardless of their attitudes toward the president, according to a new University at Buffalo study published this month in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Web and Social Media.

The findings demonstrate that beneath the polarized political views, both Republicans and Democrats share a hidden agreement surrounding Trump's online behavior.

"We were initially a bit surprised, because we had expected to find the opposite, where tweets Republicans liked most were those Democrats hated most," said Kenneth Joseph, PhD, first author and assistant professor of computer science and engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The research aimed to examine the extent of political polarization in the U.S. by examining public support for tweets shared by Trump, a highly polarizing figure in American politics.

While only 8% of Americans follow the president on Twitter, more than half of U.S. citizens are exposed to his tweets through other media, finds Gallup.

Investigators examined more than 4,300 tweets shared by Trump between February 2017 and December 2018, a period beginning shortly after his inauguration.

Public opinions of tweets were collected using surveys gathered by the YouGov TweetIndex, which asks hundreds of self-identifying Democrats and Republicans to rate tweets on a five point scale from terrible to great.

More than 1.8 million Twitter users linked to U.S. voter registration records were also analyzed for their responses to Trump's tweets, where it was assumed that retweets generally indicated support while replies showed disapproval.

Of Trump's tweets, 28% contained an insult, 22% contained a false statement and 16% offered support or condolences, the study found.

The researchers found that both parties liked when Trump showed support for the military and first responders or offered condolences, and disliked when the president shared false information or an insult.

However, public opinion differed based on the target of the insult.

Republicans showed more support for tweets that insulted Democrats and reacted negatively to insults toward other Republicans. Democrats, on the other hand, did not react positively toward Trump's assaults toward Republicans, demonstrating that the president's attacks on his own party only serve to hurt him by decreasing support from his base, according to researchers.

Democrats reacted negatively to insults toward women and members of the media. But these tweets had no significant effect on Republicans, implying that these types of messages could also hurt Trump by agitating the opposing party without increasing support from his base, the study found.

Democrats also reacted more negatively to insults aimed at white people compared to Middle Eastern individuals.

Overall, Republicans were more forgiving of Trump's actions, and were less likely to view Trump unfavorably, regardless of tweet content.

Better care and more research into treatments for people experiencing a first manic episode are urgently needed, according to researchers at the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre.

The study, published today in The Lancet Psychiatry by a team of international experts, describes patchy and inconsistent care, widespread failure to detect bipolar disorder early enough, and a lack of guidance on how to treat people experiencing mania for the first time.

The researchers reviewed current evidence to illustrate the prevalence and health burden of bipolar disorder, the typical progression of illness, evidence for a range of interventions and the content of international guidelines.

Calling for clearer treatment guidelines and targeted care within existing services, they describe how people experiencing first episode mania have been overlooked by health services, despite evidence for effective treatments. They say that care is inconsistent and that few trials have examined interventions specifically for people who have had a first manic episode.

People with bipolar disorder are 50 times more likely to self-harm compared to the general population, and at least 12 times more likely to take their own lives (higher than the rate for people with schizophrenia). The World Health Organization's Global Burden of Disease ranked bipolar disorder as the fourth leading cause of overall disease burden in people aged 10 to 24. Analyses suggest that almost 50 per cent of people present with symptoms before the age of 21, and a recent review of 27 studies suggested an average delay of almost six years between first symptoms of bipolar disorder and targeted treatment.

This new study highlights a lack of high-quality evidence for interventions in first episode mania, as well as gaps in guidelines on how to treat people experiencing mania for the first time.

Dr Sameer Jauhar, Consultant Psychiatrist for people experiencing first episode psychosis and Senior Research Fellow at the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, commented: "Bipolar illness can have serious effects on the health of a young person, their family and society in general. By identifying people who have had a first episode, and offering them appropriate treatment at an early stage, we can help them get on with their lives and prevent relapses.

"As a consultant psychiatrist, this is something I see again and again. People who are identified early and get effective treatment quickly are able to avoid further episodes and achieve extraordinary things, while others who the system doesn't serve so well can get stuck for years.

"Another really important factor is research - we need long-term studies to help guide future treatments and make sure we keep people well in the longer term."

Simon Kitchen, CEO of Bipolar UK, commented: "Bipolar UK supports thousands of people affected by bipolar disorder each year. First episode mania can have a devastating impact on people living with bipolar and their families. During the mania they might have racked up massive debts, damaged their careers and relationships with reckless behaviour or engaged in promiscuous activities that make them feel embarrassed. Post mania requires rebuilding and often coming to terms with a life-changing diagnosis. It is vital that people are not left to go through this process alone."

The paper includes a first-person account from John*, who experienced symptoms of bipolar disorder for the first time at age 16. John comments: "My struggles with mental health began at age 14 when I started to experience some symptoms of depression. However, it was when I started to develop episodes of hypomania at 16 that things really began getting out of hand. These episodes came as a shock to everyone around me. I had seemingly boundless energy levels and became convinced that I could run a successful business alongside school. I wasn't sleeping, had a constant need to pace and was very frustrated. My behaviour began to alienate everyone around me. Further episodes followed and I began engaging in risky behaviour. The doctors failed to diagnose me properly at this point because they failed to take a proper history of my mental health.

"All in all, it took four years from my first symptoms to the point when I started getting the treatment I really needed. Now, three years later, I am managing to study and work at the same time and am able to enjoy my life."

Multi-junction solar cells are both the most efficient type of solar cell on the market today and the most expensive type of solar cell to produce. In a proof-of-concept paper, researchers from North Carolina State University detail a new approach for creating multi-junction solar cells using off-the-shelf components, resulting in lower cost, high-efficiency solar cells for use in multiple applications.

Multi-junction, or stacked, solar cells are currently the most efficient cells on the market, converting up to 45% of the solar energy they absorb into electricity. The cells are constructed by stacking semiconductors with varying bandgaps on top of one another, thereby allowing the cell to absorb differing wavelengths of solar radiation. However, these cells are much more expensive to produce than less efficient thin solar films.

"We want to create high efficiency solar cells at a reasonable cost," says Salah Bedair, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State and lead author of the research. "Silicon-based thin solar cells are very popular because the material has around 20% efficiency and the cells cost about 1/10th what a multi-junction solar cell costs. And other low cost, lower efficiency materials are gaining popularity as well. If we could create stacked solar cells using this existing technology we would be well on our way to reaching our goal."

However, you cannot merely stack different solar cells on top of each other - the different materials are structurally incompatible, and so charges cannot pass through them to be collected. To solve that problem in current multi-junction solar cells heavily doped metals are used to create a tunnel junction between the various layers - adding significant expense and complexity to the multi-junction solar cell's creation.

Bedair and his team developed a simpler approach, utilizing intermetallic bonding to bond solar cells made of different materials. In a proof-of-concept, the team stacked an off-the-shelf gallium arsenide solar cell on top of a silicon solar cell.

"In multi-junction solar cells the tunnel junction enables electric connectivity by acting as a metal-to-metal connection," Bedair says. "In our system, indium serves as a shortcut to that. The existing metal contacts of the individual cells are covered with indium films. The indium films bond to themselves easily at room temperature under low pressure. The result is a solar cell made of two different materials that is mechanically stacked and electrically connected.

"With this technique we are able to take advantage of inexpensive, off-the-shelf solutions without having to develop all new technology. Manufacturers could simply tweak their existing products slightly to increase their efficiency in multi-junction solar cells, rather than having to create new products."

Thousand-year-old tropical soil unearthed by accelerating deforestation and agriculture land use could be unleashing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to a new study from researchers at Florida State University.

In an investigation of 19 sites in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, researchers discovered that heavily deforested areas leach organic carbon that is significantly older and more biodegradable than the organic carbon leached from densely forested regions.

Released from deeper soil horizons and leached by rain into waterways, that older, chemically unstable organic carbon is eventually consumed by stream-dwelling microbes, which devour the rich compounds and respire carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. It's a process that could jeopardize local ecosystems and further fuel the greenhouse effect, researchers said.

"In many ways, this is similar to what happened in the Mississippi River Basin 100 years ago, and in the Amazon more recently," said study author Rob Spencer, an associate professor in FSU's Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science. "The Congo is now facing conversion of pristine lands for agriculture. We want to know what that could mean for the carbon cycle."

While the broader effects of deforestation on the carbon cycle are well known, researchers said their findings, published today in the journal Nature Geoscience, suggest there is an additional pathway or leakage of carbon into rivers from soil churned by deforestation and land conversion.

"At this point, it's hard to know the magnitude of this flux and thus the relative importance of this process compared to other anthropogenic sources of CO2, but it is likely to grow with additional deforestation and land-use conversion," said former FSU postdoctoral researcher Travis Drake, the study's lead author. "We hope this paper stimulates more research into the relative importance of this process."

To better distinguish the different soils in their study, researchers analyzed the dissolved organic carbon drained from study sites into outflowing streams and rivers. Using ultrahigh-resolution mass spectrometry data generated by cutting-edge tools at the FSU-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, the team found that the older dissolved organics discharged from deforested areas were more energy-rich and chemically diverse than those from better-preserved forests

Overall, forested areas released significantly more dissolved organic carbon than deforested areas. But the dissolved organics that did emanate from the deforested and land-converted regions were exceptionally biolabile, or suited for microbial consumption.

"Compositionally, the dissolved organics from deforested landscapes were full of the kinds of things microbes prefer to eat -- simpler and easily accessible compounds with plenty of nitrogen," said Drake, who now conducts research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. "We think the microbial consumption of these old organics coming from soils may partially explain the higher concentrations of CO2 we observed in the deforested area streams."

In developing tropical regions like the Congo, deforestation-related soil disturbance has the potential to dramatically increase leaching of organic carbon by rainfall. That loss of organic matter could compromise soil fertility and reduce the downstream transport of critical nutrients that support aquatic and coastal ecosystems.

More broadly, this process means carbon that was safely sequestered in the Earth for millennia could now be re-entering the modern carbon cycle. If, as researchers posit, that carbon is eventually released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, it could contribute to the greenhouse effect.

Researchers said these findings underscore the urgency of identifying the second- and third-order effects of deforestation, land conversion and the unchecked disturbance of deep, nutrient-rich soils in the tropics. While widespread and systematic forest preservation is the best antidote, the paper suggests less disruptive farming practices could help offset some of the destabilization.

"This research focuses on the Congo because the tropics are really at the forefront of agriculture-driven land-use conversion," Spencer said.

"Ultimately, it depends on the preservation of forests that maintain and store carbon in soils over longer timescales," Drake added. "When land-use conversion does occur, better practices such as terracing, use of buffer strips and application of organic residues could ameliorate some of the observed organic carbon leaching."

The Goldilocks of fairy-tale fame knew something about porridge. It needed to be just right--neither too hot nor too cold. Same with furniture--neither too hard nor too soft. In a different context, scientists at UC San Diego know something about DNA. They know that the strands of our genetic code, if extended, would measure two meters, or about six feet. They also know that the strands fold into and move within the cell nucleus the size of about a hundredth of a millimeter. But they don't know how and in what state of matter this occurs, so they decided to check.

Inspired by ideas from the physics of phase transitions and polymer physics, researchers in the Divisions of Physical and Biological Sciences at UC San Diego set out specifically to determine the organization of DNA inside the nucleus of a living cell. The findings of their study, recently published in Nature Communications, suggest that the phase state of the genomic DNA is "just right"--a gel poised at the phase boundary between gel and sol, the solid-liquid phase transition.

Think of pudding, panna cotta--or even porridge. The consistency of these delectables must be just right to be ideally enjoyed. Just as the "sol-gel" phase transition, according to the scientists, seems just right for explaining the timing of genomic interactions that dictate gene expression and somatic recombination.

"This finding points to a general physical principle of chromosomal organization, which has important implications for many key processes in biology, from antibody production to tissue differentiation," said Olga Dudko, a theoretical biophysicist and professor in the Department of Physics at UC San Diego, who collaborated with colleague Cornelis Murre, a distinguished professor in the Section of Molecular Biology, on the study.

Along with Dudko's former graduate student Yaojun Zhang, now a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton, and Murre's postdoctoral scholar Nimish Khanna, the team collected and analyzed data on DNA motion inside live mammalian B-cells from mice to understand how remote genomic interactions generate a diverse pool of antibodies by the adaptive immune system.

In mammals, such as rodents and humans, immunoglobin gene segments are arranged in groups of variable (V), diversity (D) and joining (J) segments. These V, D and J segments randomly combine through the process of somatic recombination. This occurs before antigen contact and during B-cell development in the immune system's lymphoid tissue, or bone marrow. These random genetic interactions result in diverse protein codes that match up with antigens which activate lymphocytes.

The scientists examined the various interactions between V and DJ gene segments. While how exactly these interactions occur remains unknown, the UC San Diego researchers developed a strategy to track V and DJ motion in B-lymphocytes. They found that V and DJ segments were trapped in configurations that allowed local motion only--in other words, the segments remained spatially proximal if they were initially close or they remained separate if they were initially spatially distant. The researchers also observed, within a subset of cells, abrupt changes in V and DJ motion, plausibly caused by temporal changes in chromatin.

By comparing experimental and simulated data, the scientists concluded that constrained motion is imposed by a network of cross-linked chromatin chains, or a mesh of bridges between the DNA strands that are characteristic of a gel phase. Yet, the amount of these cross-links is "just right" to poise the DNA near the sol phase--a liquid phase describing a solution of uncross-linked chains.

This pattern suggested to the scientists that a certain organizational principle of genomic DNA exists--proximity to the sol-gel phase transition--which explains how the genome can simultaneously possess stability and responsiveness within the nucleus.

These results indicate that the packing pattern of DNA within a cell's nucleus has consequences for a cell's fate--whether it becomes a live or diseased cell.

"We have rigorous theories from physics--abstract principles and mathematical equations. We have state-of-the-art experiments on biology--innovative tracking of gene segments in live mammalian cell nuclei," noted Zhang. "It really amazes and excites me when the two aspects merge coherently into one story, where physics is not just a tool to describe the dynamics of gene segments, but helps to pinpoint the physical state of the genome, and further sheds light on the impact of the physical properties of this state on its biological function."

A new publication in the journal Estuaries and Coasts investigates the use of a fluorescent dye to track movements of young oysters. The publication, "Field mark-recapture of calcein-stained larval oysters (Crassostrea virginica) in a freshwater-dominated estuary", provides new knowledge on methods for tracking oysters in low salinity environments common to coastal waters, particularly in the northern Gulf of Mexico. This information is important to understand where oysters settle and grow compared to locations of parent stocks and to guide management practices of oysters or any marine species with larval stages that live in the water column.

Free-living aquatic animals have the potential to be transported long distances during early life development. These movements can influence adult distributions and subsequently how populations are connected. By understanding larval transport pathways, we can better inform restoration efforts of remaining marine invertebrate populations globally. This information is particularly important for commercial species such as oysters, which are a valuable resource for Alabama and other coastal waters.

"By knowing where larvae originate and where they end up, we can determine what locations are better for oyster populations and provide managers with information to select sites for oyster restoration," said Haley Gancel, Ph.D. candidate, who is lead author on the research study. Gancel is a student at the University of South Alabama and works with Dr. Ruth H. Carmichael at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

Determining larval transport pathways is a challenge due to the microscopic size of larvae,
high mortalities rates, and dilution in the marine environment. In this study researchers used a harmless fluorescent dye called calcein to track oyster larval movements in Mobile Bay, AL and found that oyster larvae are transported from lower Mobile Bay to Mississippi Sound, using dominate freshwater flow paths.

The approach used in this study can be applied to a wider range of marine species and help understand how larvae are transported in the marine environment and aid in restoration and management of this and other species throughout their range.

Brazilian and German scientists have completed a collaborative project to sequence and analyze the whole genome of Arapaima gigas, a giant freshwater fish known in Brazil as pirarucu and elsewhere as arapaima or paiche. Its growth rate is the fastest among known freshwater fish species. Its natural distribution covers most of the Amazon River basin in Peru and Brazil.

The research led to discoveries that help determine sex at an early stage, facilitating the separation of female and male fry for sex-specific breeding and sale. It also paves the way for further studies relating to genetic improvement of the species.

The findings of the research, which was supported by FAPESP, are published in Scientific Reports.

The collaboration began in 2015, when Manfred Schartl, a geneticist at the University of Würzburg in Germany, was contacted by biologist Rafael Henrique Nóbrega and his then PhD student Marcos Antonio de Oliveira. Oliveira has since earned his doctorate from São Paulo State University's Aquaculture Center in Botucatu, Brazil.

Nóbrega, a professor at the university's Bioscience Institute (IB-UNESP), proposed collaboration on research into the mechanisms of sex determination and differentiation in A. gigas.

"It's the world's largest freshwater fish and an iconic Amazon species with considerable economic value, so Schartl was surprised that its genome was unknown at the time and that genetic markers hadn't been identified for sex determination," Nóbrega told.

Juveniles do not have sex-related secondary phenotypical differences, so males and females cannot be distinguished by morphology during early development, Nóbrega explained. Information on sex determination and differentiation mechanisms represents an important advance for the Brazilian aquaculture industry.

Schartl and his group specialize in identifying sex determination genes in fish and understanding sex differentiation mechanisms in this abundant and diverse group of vertebrates.

Early sex determination before juveniles reach maturity, when males and females differentiate morphologically and phenotypically, is a key step in the study of a fish species' reproductive cycle.

Advancing knowledge

A draft genome of A. gigas was published in September 2018 by researchers at the Federal University of Pará and Rio Grande do Norte, among other institutions.

The sequencing performed more recently by Nóbrega, Oliveira and collaborators led to important genetic discoveries linked to such characteristics as gigantism and rapid growth. It also showed that the sex determination and differentiation in the species are compatible with an XY chromosome sex determination system.

The research was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP via a regular grant awarded to Nóbrega and a PhD grant awarded to Oliveira.

"Although A. gigas doesn't have heteromorphic sex chromosomes that can be detected cytologically [by tissue cell analysis], we identified exclusively male markers that support the existence of an XY chromosome sex determination system," Nóbrega said.

In 2015, Oliveira went to a fish farm called Peixes da Amazônia in Senador Guiomard, near Rio Branco, state capital of Acre in North Brazil, and collected small pieces of the fins of A. gigas from 60 adults (30 males and 30 females).

The material was sent to Schartl's laboratory, where DNA was sampled from each of the 60 specimens. The DNA was then sequenced in France by researchers at the National Institute for Agricultural Research in Rennes and Toulouse and the University of Montpellier.

"Genomes of different sizes for males and females were obtained. The male genome has 666 million base pairs, while the female genome has 664 million. Both are quite small as fish genomes go, and only a fifth the size of the human genome, which has 3 billion base pairs," Oliveira said.

The genome of A. gigas was compared with that of another bonytongue, the Asian arowana Scleropages formosus, the only other species in the order Osteoglossiformes with a sequenced genome. It was also compared with the genomes of ten other species belonging to various orders, such as the European eel (Anguilla anguilla), the Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), the Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus), the Torafugu (Takifugu rubripes), the Zebrafish (Danio rerio) and the primitive coelacanths (Latimeria spp.), which evolved 400 million years ago and since then have changed little or not at all.

"A phylogenetic tree was constructed indicating the probable divergence times for the ancestors of the species studied. The more closely related they are genetically, the shorter the time between lineage-splitting events. The order Osteoglossiformes, to which arapaimas and other bonytongues belong, evolved 138.4 million years ago, i.e., at the same time South America and Africa began separating prior to the opening of the South Atlantic," Nóbrega said.

The closest relative among the ten species analyzed was A. anguilla, which 200 million years ago had a common ancestor with arapaimas and other bonytongues.

Adaptive success

The researchers also set out to identify positively selected genes in the genome of A. gigas, meaning genes that resulted from adaptive evolution of a lineage and frequently associated with newly enhanced or selected functions of the species.

"In fact, we identified 105 positively selected genes in A. gigas, some relating to growth and cell division," Nóbrega said.

The data suggested that the spectacular early growth and gigantism of this fish species were the key to its adaptive success. This characteristic was not observed in any other species the researchers studied.

Genetic analysis showed that the functions of these positively selected genes are associated mainly with muscle development and contribute to its large body size.

Aquaculture and sexual development

A. gigas can reach almost 3 m in length and weigh as much as 220 kg. Osteoglossiformes, the order to which it belongs, is an old group of freshwater fish species originating in Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent that began breaking up approximately 140 million years ago to form what are now South America, Africa, India, Antarctica and Australia.

As a result of the breakup and landmass drift lasting millions of years, extant lineages of Osteoglossiformes are now highly adapted to freshwater life, unable to survive in saltwater, and separated by vast oceans.

A. gigas is found only in the Amazon Basin. Its closest relatives, the ten species of arowana, are found on four continents: South America (three species), Africa (one), Asia (four) and Australia (two).

"Juveniles weigh 10 to 15 kg a year after birth and their food conversion rate is extraordinarily efficient," Nóbrega said. They gain 700 g with every kg of food consumed.

Furthermore, arapaimas are obligate air breathers, obtaining up to 95% of their oxygen uptake from atmospheric air. Having degenerate gills has given them an adaptive advantage in that they tolerate extremely low oxygen levels in the waters they inhabit, where other species could not survive.

"This combination of unusual adaptations makes A. gigas a promising candidate for aquaculture. The Amazon region has many small fish farms, but large-scale production has proved unviable so far," Nóbrega said.

The difficulty is partly due to insufficient knowledge of its sexual development so that it can be successfully bred in captivity and to lack information about the molecular and biochemical mechanisms involved in its fast growth and gigantism.

"One thing we do know is that A. gigas becomes sexually mature by age four and a half [the species is believed to live as long as 100 years]. Sexual dimorphism appears in the reproductive stage, when scale color becomes redder in males to differentiate them from females," Oliveira said.

To find ways of determining the sex of juveniles as early as possible, Nóbrega and colleagues looked for "sex markers" - parts of the genome that are unequivocally associated with one sex or the other.

Because A. gigas does not have sex chromosomes (different chromosomes in males and females), the researchers focused on identifying molecular markers or genomic regions present in males and not in females or vice versa.

They first mapped restriction site-associated DNA (RAD) markers, a technique used to investigate population genetics, ecological genetics and evolution. "Based on an analysis of RAD markers present in the genetic material from 25 males and 25 females, 30 RAD markers were found to be present in most of the males but absent in most of the females," Nóbrega said.

Despite the lack of sex chromosomes, the researchers detected RAD markers capable of showing whether a juvenile is male in genetic testing. "In fact, the data point to a specific genomic region characteristic of males and not found in females, so that it can be considered compatible with an XY chromosome sex determination system," Nóbrega said.

Secretory organ

A. gigas displays morphological specialization linked to reproduction in the shape of a secretory organ reputedly used for parental care. This gland on the heads of both males and females lacks sex-specific morphological differences.

During the reproductive period the gland secretes a milky fluid that is thought to provide offspring with nutrients. "The fluid feeds larvae while they develop into fry," Nóbrega said.

Males engage in parental care and stay with offspring for up to three months, while females leave after about a month.

"We took samples of secretory organ tissue from males and females in order to analyze the transcriptome - the full set of transcribed sequences in the tissue, including messenger RNA, ribosomal RNA, transport RNA and microRNA," Nóbrega said.

"The results suggest the milky fluid released by the secretory organ contains compounds that prevent the female from entering a new reproductive cycle while parental care is ongoing. In addition, the fluid contains growth factors that may explain the very fast growth of fry."

A 10 per cent tax on sugary drinks has cut the purchase and consumption of sugary drinks by an average of 10 per cent in places it has been introduced, a just published major review has found.

Researchers from the University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand, combined evidence from settings where a sugary drinks' tax had been applied and evaluated it into a meta-analysis. Studies included four cities in the US: Cleveland, Ohio; Portland, Maine; Berkeley, California; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A regional tax was studied in Catalonia, Spain, and the effects of country-wide taxes were studied in Chile, France and Mexico.

The research is published in the international scientific journal, Obesity Reviews.

Lead author Dr Andrea Teng says the research takes a new approach in combining multiple
studies examining the real-world impact of sugary drink taxes on sales, purchases and dietary intake before and after taxes were imposed, or between taxed and untaxed settings.

"This new review presents compelling evidence that sugary drink taxes result in decreased sales, purchasing or dietary intake of taxed beverages. For a 10 per cent tax, sugary drink volumes declined by an average of 10 per cent.

"It shows taxes on sugary drinks are an effective tool to reduce consumption, and we know from other research that the high consumption of sugary drinks increases the risk of obesity, diabetes and dental caries."

Dr Teng says there is also evidence that sugary drink consumption may contribute to heart disease, cancer and premature death.

Some of the studies looked at the alternative drinks people consumed instead of sugary drinks after the tax was applied. With a 10 per cent tax on sugary drinks, there was a 1.9 per cent increase on average in such alternative drinks, and for water specifically there was a 2.9 per cent increase. This healthier substitution pattern is not conclusive, but in three out of the four settings where substitution occurred, the increase in consumption of the other non-sugary drinks was statistically significant.

A co-author of the review, Dr Amanda Jones, says all the individual studies in the review found a reduction in sugary drink consumption, but the impact in some settings was greater than others. Applying tax by thresholds of sugar content, rather than as a percentage of price, appeared to be important for determining a more favourable impact.

Other reasons for differences between settings may be the combination with other obesity prevention policies, the public's awareness of the tax, industry responses, consumer preferences, border permeability, availability of alternative beverages, and sensitivity to price. For example, Chile also decreased tax on low-sugar beverages at the same time as increasing the tax on high-sugar beverages; Mexico introduced a sugary drinks' tax combined with a junk food tax; and France also taxed soft drinks with artificial sweeteners.

"Some of the differences found in these studies may also be due to non-price mechanisms. For example, a tax may signal to the public the seriousness of the health concern associated with consuming a product," Dr Jones says.

"A tax can also prompt manufacturers to reformulate sugar levels downward, as seen in the UK, even before their tax was introduced in April 2018."

Some studies looked at the impact of sugary drink taxes by socio-economic factors, but more research is needed in this area, the authors say. In Mexico, for instance, there were greater consumption declines in lower income households, while the opposite was true in Chile.

The World Health Organization recommends governments impose a 20 per cent tax on sugary drinks, saying the evidence for reduced consumption and meaningful health effects is strongest for this food category.

Humans began cultivating crops about 12,000 years ago. Ants have been at it rather longer. Leafcutter ants, the best-known insect farmers, belong to a lineage of insects that have been running fungus farms based on chopped-up vegetable matter for over 50 million years. The ant farming of flowering plants, however, started more recently, about 3 million years ago in the Fiji Islands.

Research, led by Dr Guillaume Chomicki from the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, has demonstrated that millions of years of ant agriculture has remodelled plant physiology. Farming ants deposit nitrogen-rich faeces directly inside plants, which has led to the evolution of these ultra-absorptive plant structures. This means that ant-derived nutrients are actively targeted on the hyper-absorptive sites, rather than deposited as a result of by-products. This new understanding may offer important clues in our fight for food security.

Dr Chomicki, the lead author of the study, says: 'The speed at which plants can take up nitrogen is a key limitation to plant growth rate. Most plants, including our crops, take up nitrogen from the soil and are thus not naturally exposed to very high nitrogen concentrations. Here, for millions of years, ants have deposited nitrogen-rich faeces directly inside the plants.' Ongoing work aims to decipher the genetic basis of the ultra-absorptive plant structures discovered in this study, which may ultimately be transferred to our crops and thereby increase their nitrogen uptake rate.

It's a unique kind of farming where the ants grow not only their food, but also their home: the plants provide ready-made cavities in which the ants nest. This relationship is essential for both parties: the ants have lost the nest-building ability that most other tropical tree-dwelling ants have, and the plants - which are epiphytes (plants growing on the surface of trees) - rely on ants for nutrients and defence.

To test whether the ant-farmed plants' nutrition has itself changed, Chomicki tracked the deposition of nutrients by ants inside these Fiji-island plants. In the farmed plant species, specialized ants exclusively defecate on hyper-absorptive warts on the walls inside the plant. In closely-related non-farmed plant species living in the same Fijian rainforests, the ants do not show this farming behaviour. This research shows that similar hyper-absorptive warts have evolved repeatedly in plants colonized by farming ants.

The research published today in New Phytologist, reveals that because insect farmers supply their crops with nutrients, they have the potential to modify crop nutrition, and in the case of ants, this has led to evolutionary changes in both partners; the ants and the plants.

Professor Renner, from the University of Munich, and senior author of the study, said: 'Domestication of plants by ants has led to a >2-fold increase in uptake of ant-derived nitrogen, and this tight nutrient recycling is a key asset for the epiphytes to live in soilless canopies.'

This supports the notion that millions of years of ant agriculture have remodelled plant physiology, shifting from ant-derived nutrients as by-products to active and targeted fertilization on hyper-absorptive sites. Much like our emerging 'precision agriculture' where computer-controlled devices and drones are used to target nutrients to the spots in the field where they are most needed, these ants have evolved a special kind of precision farming. They target nutrients to specific tissues in the plants that are hyper-absorptive.

Monarch butterflies purchased from a commercial breeder did not fly in a southward direction, even in offspring raised outdoors, in a new study conducted by scientists at the University of Chicago. Wild-caught monarchs bred indoors under simulated outdoor conditions also did not orient south, suggesting that captive breeding disrupts the monarch's famous annual migratory behavior.

The National Wildlife Federation estimates that the North American monarch population has declined 90% over the last two decades. As the number of butterflies that reaches their winter habitats in California and Mexico dwindles, monarch enthusiasts have turned to a variety of conservation efforts, including captive breeding and release of the butterflies throughout the summer and autumn. However, the new study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that these well-intentioned practices may not have the desired effect.

"We hope this will be an avenue into understanding how monarchs are losing migration," said Marcus Kronforst, PhD, associate professor of ecology and evolution at UChicago and the study's senior author. "These monarchs have been brought into captivity and prevented from migrating for many generations, and they have genetically lost migration. It's a microcosm for what's happening naturally."

A 'flight simulator' for butterflies

Ayse Tenger-Trolander, a PhD student in Kronforst's lab and lead author of the new study, ordered several adult monarch butterflies from a commercial supplier and placed them in an outdoor garden on the rooftop of a building on the UChicago campus. The butterflies were enclosed in mesh cages but otherwise exposed to natural light, temperature and moisture.

Monarchs breed during the summer and autumn, the autumn generation being the one that migrates. Tenger-Trolander collected eggs from the commercially purchased adults after they mated and raised them to adult butterflies. That summer generation then became the parents of the autumn generation.

Tenger-Trolander then tested this autumn generation in a "flight simulator" to see the predominant direction they fly. The simulator is an open-ended, metal cylinder, like a pipe standing on one end. The butterfly is connected to a rod near the top opening of the cylinder by a metal pin, or tether, attached to its abdomen. This makes the butterflies fly in place inside the cylinder, but they are free to rotate 360 degrees. The rotating dial records the direction of the butterfly every two milliseconds and saves the data to a computer.

Butterflies that exhibit migratory behavior should fly predominantly toward the south inside this flight simulator. The locally-captured monarchs raised in the same gardens did just that. However, Tenger-Trolander saw that the generation of butterflies bred from the commercial monarchs didn't fly in a dominant direction.

Tenger-Trolander also performed a second set of experiments starting with only wild-caught monarchs and rearing the offspring completely inside. She tried to mimic outdoor conditions by adjusting temperature and the hours of daylight, but as a group, these butterflies did not show signs of migratory flight either. Some individuals did fly pointing south, but as a group they did not collectively fly predominantly in a southward direction. In fact, taking a chrysalis that had been developing outdoors and bringing it inside just as it was about to emerge also "broke" the migratory behavior in the group as a whole.

"I thought there was no way that would matter, but it did," said Tenger-Trolander. "We know there are many hobbyists and enthusiast breeders who are trying to do their best husbandry and avoid buying from commercial breeders. But there could be an issue with the way they're raising them indoors too."

Differences buried in the genome

Several populations of monarchs have dispersed throughout the world to Central and South America, the Caribbean, southern Europe, northern Africa and across the Pacific Ocean to Australia, but none of these new populations migrate like those in North America. Kronforst and Tenger-Trolander also studied the genetic makeup of the commercially-bred butterflies to see how they differ from typical North American monarchs. Is the reason the commercial monarchs don't migrate because they originated from a newer, non-migrating population?

The genetic analysis showed that the commercially-bred butterflies did originate from North America, but they are genetically different enough to count as distinct population, separate from North American or any of the other groups that made it to another continent. Kronforst said he believes the loss of migration lies in these genetic discrepancies.

"We can't point to a single genetic change that did it because there are lots of them," he said. "But we think somewhere buried in the genome are changes that have broken it."

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering whether to list the North American monarch as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Any conservation efforts are welcome, the researchers say, and hobbyists raising caterpillars in their gardens or elementary school science classes releasing butterflies into the wild are great ways to engage the public. But the new study shows that however well-intentioned, monarch enthusiasts should remember that the migratory behavior of these beloved butterflies is incredibly fragile.

"It looks like buying monarchs to raise and release doesn't contribute to the migratory population, and raising them indoors probably isn't helpful either," Kronforst said. "If you want to grow milkweed in your garden and raise monarchs you find around your house, just don't take them inside. If you keep them outdoors, they should be totally fine."

Following a stroke, antibodies that inhibit the signaling molecule Nogo-A can help repair blood vessels in the affected brain regions. This also promotes the regaining of motor functions, researchers at the University of Zurich have shown in a mouse model. The study opens up new avenues for treatment.

Each year, around 16,000 people in Switzerland and 15 million people worldwide suffer a stroke. Two thirds of those affected die or remain in permanent need of care due to the brain's limited capacity to regenerate damaged tissue and neural circuits. At present, despite intensive research efforts only few medical therapy options are available that reduce the serious consequences after cerebral stroke.

Signaling molecule Nogo-A regulates blood vessel sprouting

A promising new approach to promote the recovery of physiological functions aims to repair the system of blood vessels in the affected brain regions. The system supplies the injured tissue with oxygen and key nutrients. In people who have suffered a stroke, this repair process is inhibited by a number of mechanisms. A few years ago, the research group of UZH Professor Martin Schwab used a mouse model to, among other things, show that the signaling molecule Nogo-A not only reduces the growth of nerve fibers, but also regulates blood vessel sprouting in the brain and could thus also inhibit their repair.

Motor function improvement thanks to vascular growth

In a new study with mice, the researchers genetically deactivated the Nogo-A molecule or one of its corresponding receptors S1PR2. The blood vessels in these mice showed improved regenerative capacity, and they recovered affected motor skills better than those of the mice in the control group. These findings were reproduced in a therapeutic approach using anti-Nogo-A antibodies in mice following a stroke, which too led to the re-formation of a robust and functional vascular network around the affected brain regions. "The nervous system of the treated mice showed better recovery and their motor functions were less affected, which we ascribe to vascular regeneration," says first author and UZH neuroscientist Ruslan Rust.

Nogo-A antibodies already in clinical tests for spinal cord injuries

Previous experimental efforts to enhance vessel growth have almost exclusively focused on vascular growth factor supplementation, an approach that has been shown to be clinically unviable due to adverse side effects such as increased risk of hemorrhage. "Our findings provide a promising alternative approach to treating stroke patients," says Rust, "not least since anti-Nogo-A antibodies are already being used in clinical testing for spinal cord injuries."

You might expect that plants hoping to thrive in California's boom-or-bust rain cycle would choose to set down roots in a place that can store lots of water underground to last through drought years.

But some of the most successful plant communities in the state -- and probably in Mediterranean climates worldwide -- that are characterized by wet winters and dry summers have taken a different approach. They've learned to thrive in areas with a below-ground water storage capacity barely large enough to hold the water that falls even in lean years.

Surprisingly, these plants do well in both low-water and rainy years precisely because the soil and weathered rock below ground store so little water relative to the rain delivered.

"The key point from our study is that, in many sites on the North Coast, the storage capacity is small relative to how much it rains," said Jesse Hahm, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of two first authors of the study. "Because the capacity for the subsurface to store water over the wet season is small, it still rains enough, even in the dry years, to replenish the water supply. The limited below-ground storage capacity is the key mechanism that decouples the plants and how much water availability they have in the summer from big swings in winter rainfall."

As a result, these plants are much more resilient in drought years, as evidenced by California's relatively unscathed North Coast during recent droughts that killed hundreds of millions of trees in the Sierra Nevada.

"Because the subsurface water gets replenished even in drought years, in the summer these plants feel the same amount of water supply below ground, no matter how much rain fell during the winter," Hahm said. "They don't really know if it rained a lot or a little, because they have the same amount of water stored below ground each summer."

On the flip side, plants growing today on ground that can soak up as much water as the winter rains can provide are hosting plants that will have to deal with the state's increasingly drier climate, putting them at risk as the climate changes. This may be a problem for Sierra Nevada plant communities that are relying less on a persistent snowpack and increasingly on stored subsurface water to last through the dry summer.

Hahm and David Dralle, the other first author and a former Berkeley graduate student who is an assistant professor at Sacramento State University, describe their findings, along with their colleagues, in a paper recently accepted by the journal Geophysical Research Letters and now online.

Rock moisture

While most people think plants rely only on water stored in the topsoil, Berkeley's William Dietrich, professor of earth and planetary science, and recent graduate Daniella Rempe, an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Austin, recently discovered that water stored in fractured and weathered rock underneath the soil plays an equal or greater role. What Dietrich and Rempe call "rock moisture" can amount to a significant proportion of what plants rely on annually.

A major implication of the new study, Dietrich says, is that global climate models need to incorporate rock moisture into their calculations to accurately represent and predict the impacts of drought or heavy rainfall. In recent years, drought- or heat-killed trees have fueled catastrophic wildfires in California, Spain, Greece, Australia and many regions with a dry, Mediterranean climate.

"Understanding how water is stored deep within the weathered bedrock and how variations in that water supply and in rainfall affect plant water supply in that zone is extremely important in a seasonally dry climate," Hahm said.

In their study, the researchers looked at 26 sites statewide. All were below the snow belt, so that winter rain stored below ground was the dominant source of water for the plants during the summer dry season. Using rainfall data and U.S. Geological Survey stream flow data to calculate the amount of water stored annually underground, they were able to assess the below-ground storage capacity of the soil and the weathered rock.

Of the 26 sites, only seven -- all in the Northern Coast Ranges -- had limited subsurface water storage capacity and fared well during the state's recent protracted drought, between 2011 and 2016. These sites ranged from grass and oak savanna and chaparral to dense Douglas fir forests, but all were characterized by low subsurface storage relative to average annual rainfall in the area, which tends to be high. The excess water that the subsurface couldn't store in the winter ran through the soil and fractured bedrock and ended up in the streams.

The other sites, including most sites in Southern California, suffered in the drought, with vegetation die-offs and less healthy, less green plants. All were characterized by below-ground storage that is sufficient to sop up most of the rainfall that falls yearly, but that had been left depleted in drought years.

Using satellite images to gauge the productivity and health of the vegetation at each site, the researchers concluded that the sites with high relative storage capacity were the ones that varied the most between wet and dry years in how green the plants were. Sites with low below-ground storage capacity relative to average annual precipitation fared better, remaining similarly green and healthy in drought years and wet years alike.

Hahm noted that many plants in the Sierra Nevada rely on the snowpack to quench their thirst during typical rainless summers. But as temperatures rise with global warming, winter precipitation will increasingly occur as rain.

"In a way, this is a glimpse into the future," Hahm said. "As the climate warms, and as the snowline elevation increases in these mountain ranges, more and more places will switch from being reliant on snowpack to being reliant on water stored in the subsurface. Understanding how this storage capacity limitation will impact plants across the state in high montane areas needs to be explored more."

The insights about rock moisture emerged from a long-term project at the Angelo Coast Range Reserve in Northern California, part of the UC Natural Reserve System, where scientists at the Eel River Critical Zone Observatory followed water from the sky through vegetation, soil and rock into the streams and back up into the atmosphere via evaporation and transpiration to chart the life cycle of water in the environment. Primary funding for the observatory, which Dietrich directs, comes from the National Science Foundation (EAR 1331940).

BROOKLYN, New York, Monday, June 24, 2019 – For the first time, researchers have shown a causal link between print news media coverage of U.S. gun control policy in the wake of mass shooting events and increases in firearm acquisition, particularly in states with the least restrictive gun laws.

The results of a study led by researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, in collaboration with faculty at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and Northeastern University, are rooted in a data-driven approach that reveals causal relationships, rather than mere correlations. It is the first study to quantify the influence of news media stories on firearm prevalence.

“Media Coverage and Firearm Acquisition in the Aftermath of a Mass Shooting” was published today in Nature Human Behaviour.

Increases in firearm purchases following mass shootings are well-observed phenomena, likely driven by concerns that these events could lead to more restrictive gun controls. Lead author Maurizio Porfiri, NYU Tandon professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, noted that this is the first study to empirically examine — and confirm — the link between news stories specifically about gun policy and increased acquisition of firearms. However, in one surprising finding, the analysis revealed no causal link between an actual mass shooting and gun purchases. Previous studies had noted a correlation between the two.

The latest study quantified influences among the three variables: mass shooting events, media coverage of gun control policy and regulations, and firearm acquisition. Researchers analyzed 69 mass shootings in the United States between January 1999 and December 2017, gathering data on the number of firearm background checks per month (a proxy measure for gun purchases), along with all print news coverage of firearm control policies that appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post during that same period — more than 9,700 documents.

The increases in firearm background checks were most pronounced in states with the least restrictive gun control policies — including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Ohio, and Oregon — and less dramatic in states with stronger restrictions on gun ownership. The team found no significant links between other variables.

“This study provides the critical insight that media coverage appears to mediate the increase in firearm acquisition following mass shootings,” Porfiri said.

“The public health impact of firearm-related physical injury has dramatically increased over recent years and is now a leading cause of death,” said James A. Macinko, a co-author of the study and professor of health policy and management and community health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “Our study suggests the need for dialogue around how mass shooting events are discussed by the press, in order to find ways to mitigate unintended consequences.”

The team employed a mathematical construct known as entropy transfer, which can establish causal links between multiple variables by examining the degree to which one variable influences another. In these analyses, influence is defined as an improved ability to make predictions about the future status of a variable (in this case, background checks) based on present knowledge of another variable (media stories about gun control policy).

To further test the validity of the causal link, researchers also searched for influential relationships between mass shootings, background checks, and media coverage of gun-related topics that excluded discussion of gun control policies or regulations. The only link discovered was obvious: a causal link between mass shootings and media coverage of those events. The team also probed potential causal links between firearm background checks and media coverage of unemployment, which has been linked to higher rates of violent crime and could theoretically prompt heightened interest in acquiring firearms for self-defense. None was found.

"The results establish the first step toward our aim of creating a mathematical model of the firearm ecosystem in the United States that explains the relationships among key events," said co-author Rifat Sipahi, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University. “Moving forward, one key aspect of such a model will be to understand how subsequent events unfold and how the presence of time delays between them influence the fate of the ecosystem.”

Co-author Shinnosuke Nakayama, a postdoctoral fellow in Porfiri’s laboratory, added: “As an ecologist, I see gun violence in the U.S. as complex ecological processes consisting of multiple agents interacting with each other and the environment. By identifying keystone agents and their ecological functions through rigorous statistics, we will be able to provide tools and transparent guidance for policy."

Raghu Ram Sattanapalle, a doctoral student in Porfiri’s Dynamical Systems Laboratory, is also part of the research team.

"At the heart of NYU Tandon is a desire to develop technologies and knowledge that make the world safer, healthier, and more sustainable,” said NYU Tandon Dean Jelena Kovačević. "This research embodies that goal, revealing new and important insights into one of the drivers behind the growth in the number of firearms in the United States. I congratulate Professor Porfiri and his collaborators on a thought-provoking paper that stands to have significant societal impact.”

The researchers acknowledge several limitations to the study, including the small number of media outlets analyzed. Additionally, background checks are not a direct measure of gun purchases, although they are the closest proxy measure due to the lack of a nationwide gun registry. The study accounted for neither the number of people killed per mass shooting nor the circumstances under which the event took place — elements that can influence media coverage.

“Media Coverage and Firearm Acquisition in the Aftermath of a Mass Shooting” is available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0636-0.

About the New York University Tandon School of Engineering

The NYU Tandon School of Engineering dates to 1854, the founding date for both the New York University School of Civil Engineering and Architecture and the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (widely known as Brooklyn Poly). A January 2014 merger created a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a tradition of invention and entrepreneurship and dedicated to furthering technology in service to society. In addition to its main location in Brooklyn, NYU Tandon collaborates with other schools within NYU, one of the country’s foremost private research universities, and is closely connected to engineering programs at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. It operates Future Labs focused on start-up businesses in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and an award-winning online graduate program. For more information, visit engineering.nyu.edu.

Media contacts:

Kathleen Hamilton, NYU Tandon
646-997-3792 / mobile 347-843-9782kathleen.hamilton@nyu.edu

Carla Denly, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health
310-825-6738cdenly@support.ucla.edu

Journal

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-019-0636-0